Remove thy presence

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Recent issues with the Facebook terms of service—which would have given Facebook rights to everything you post there, for the remainder of time—had some users threatening to pull out. Which is probably why Facebook recanted on the changes and suddenly embraced democracy for its guidelines.

If you're still steamed, you have a couple of ways to leave FB behind. First is simple "deactivation." Visit your Facebook Account page and click the "deactivate" link at the bottom. Facebook will make an attempt to guilt-trip you into staying by pointing out just how many of your social-network friends won't be able to keep in touch. It even displays pictures of people you're in photos with, playing on your emotions with captions such as, "Mark will miss you" and "Wendy will miss you." Sure they will. Then how come they never poke me?

Once you've cleared the tears from your eyes, you'll notice another message on-screen, wherein the Facebook Team points out that you shouldn't deactivate because of that silly old terms of service change. That "was a mistake we have now corrected." Too much hullaballoo.

Soldier on. You have to provide a reason to deactivate, whether you'll be back or not, and you can also opt out of getting e-mails from Facebook while deactivated. That's the trick: Deactivation is not the same as deletion. Your account simply becomes invisible. Your friends on Facebook will all think you bailed. However, you have the option to reactivate it in the future, without losing any photos, notes, or pokes.

True deletion of a Facebook account means losing all of those—so be sure you have local copies of photos and notes before you take this step. You can't reactivate. Here's the link to the Delete My Account page.